Coyote Waits by Tony Hillerman Page B

dangerous territory. Very efficient.”
    “I still don’t like them,” Janet said, but she was staring up into the formation. “Look. I think that’s paint.”
    It was. Above them and to their left, Chee could see a face of the basalt cliff reflecting white. Reaching it involved climbing up a deep crack into a long, narrow pocket. But eons of erosion had filled it with enough fallen rocks and blown dust to form a floor. There Chee leaned against the stone, breathing hard, the bottom level of the paint just above his head.
    “Look here,” Janet said. She was kneeling on the dirt. “Can you believe this? I think somebody carried a ladder in here.”
    If Janet was breathing hard it didn’t show. But Chee was, and was embarrassed by it. It was being out of shape, he thought. Too long in the hospital bed. Too many weeks without exercise. Climbing with one hand in a bandage hadn’t been easy. He would have to get back into doing some exercises.
    He took a long, deep breath and squatted beside her. Two narrow, rectangular shapes had been pressed into the earth, the proper distance apart to have been made by the feet of a ladder.
    “A determined painter,” Janet said. “With a plan, obviously. Why else haul a ladder way up in here? He had to know he was going to be reaching up somewhere where he’d need it.”
    Chee was examining the holes the ladder had left. He was wishing they’d climbed in here when the light was better.
    “I think that’s interesting,” Janet said.
    He stood and brushed off his jeans with his good hand, wondering if Nez actually caught the son-of-a-bitch. Did Nez chase him? Did he even know Nez was after him?
    “Did this crazy rock painter kill Nez?” Janet asked.
    “Ashie Pinto shot Nez in the chest,” Chee said. “But did this nutty rock painter have anything to do with it? Did he see it happen?”
    “He seems nutty all right,” Janet said. She had climbed halfway out of the pocket and was staring up into the broken, slanted wilderness of slabs, crags, boulders, and cliffs of the upthrust. “You can see several painted places back in there. One big squarish place, and a narrow vertical strip and some other small places.”
    Chee climbed up beside her.
    “If he saw it happen, and I can find him, then you could just plead Pinto guilty,” Chee said. “No use letting it go to trial. Just make a deal for him.”
    Janet let it pass, staring up into the formation. “Odd,” she said.
    “It doesn’t seem to form any pattern,” Chee agreed. “Or communicate anything or make any sense.” With his knife, he scraped at the painted stone where they were standing, collecting a sample from the lower edge of the brush mark. Then he bent close, examining it in the dimming red glow of the twilight.
    “He’s sending some sort of signal to flying saucers,” Janet said. “Or when the Mesa airliner comes over here flying down to Gallup, this says ‘you’re lost’ to the pilot. Or the guy who is doing it, they lost his luggage and when you look down from the airplane this is some sort of awful obscene insult.”
    “Look at this,” Chee said.
    Janet bent closer. “What?”
    “It washed down a little,” Chee said, indicating the flow with his finger.
    “So?”
    “So I think the paint was fresh when it started raining. He was still painting when the rain began.”
    “Ah,” Janet Pete said. “So maybe there was a witness. Maybe . . .” Her voice trailed off, turning squeaky. She shrank away from the slab where she had been leaning, away from a buzzing sound.
    “Jim,” she whispered. “Don’t tell me that’s what I think it is.”
    “Only if you don’t think it’s a rattlesnake,” Chee said. “Move back toward me. It’s under the edge of that slab. See it?”
    Janet made no effort to see it. “Let’s go,” she said. And went, and it was still light enough to see that the old green Bronco II was no longer parked behind the junipers.
     
     
    She rolled the Toyota to a